A Job is a Terrible Thing to Waste — Even for a Musician
Your favorite artist might wash dishes to support his music habit, and so what?
It’s Saturday evening, and the weighted scent of quality cigars perfumes Greater Trumps, a dark Southeast Portland bar owned by the all-purpose Oregon ingestion juggernaut called McMenimans. Across from me in the spot’s sole corner booth, Martyn Leaper isn’t smoking, yet there’s an air of celebration about him that’s cut with something like relief. On the previous night Leaper, leader of The Minders — a band that made substantial end-of-millenium noise — wrapped final mixes on Into the River, a long-playing collection of songs that Larry Crane (The Decemberists, Elliot Smith) calls “the most varied, expansive and best record” of the band’s career.
A heavyset 46, Martyn Leaper (pictured above) isn’t the archetypal rock star — unless that rock star is Frank Black and Frankie Baby has left his contact lenses at the crib. And even if the album outperforms Leaper’s greatest expectations, the musician doesn’t expect to quit his day job. Nor would he want to. He appears Red Auerbach-happy because he’s not just a client in this cigar bar, he’s a manager inside its umbrella company.
“It’s going to come as a shock to people, but these days [musicians] have other pursuits.” Leaper says. “This is a good thing.”
As the Southern England native describes his unglamourous life outside of melodic garage rock with increasing boldness, he underlines — intentionally or not — the idea that popular music archetypes were really a 20th-century conceit. Because, unless you’re as deeply branded as U2, the Rolling Stones or Taylor Swift, if you’re coming from the rock universe, there’s a strong chance that you’re struggling financially. If you’re a popular indie and haven’t had the good fortune of some company licensing your song for a commercial, you might very well be broke.
In 2015, streaming service stinginess and voracious music consumers who consider free music a Jah-given right can animate even the most unassuming artist. (Full-disclosure: the artists discussed here were discovered with support from the Content Creators Coalition.) The present digital paradigm is literally killing musicians’ careers. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 44,600 Americans told the government they earned a living as musician in 2000. By 2011, that number had fallen to 34,700.
So, Martyn Leaper orders a second beer, then spills the beans:
Early in the aughts, the era of “Hurray for Tuesday” — his band’s most successfully realized composition — had come and gone. With an almost inexplicable fickleness, Pitchfork stopped crushing on Elephant 6, the collective that includes of Montreal, Apples in Stereo and The Minders, among other indie influencers.
Just like that, the band was off the hip list. The exit of Leaper’s wife was right around the corner. Rejected and confounded about “how to get back in,” Leaper stopped writing. He began working two real-world jobs in order to pay the bills.
One gig was washing dishes in an eatery built so that kitchen workers were visible to diners. A couple of fervent Minders fans stopped in for a meal one night and recognized him.
“What are you doing here?” one asked.
Leaper doesn’t remember if it was the husband or the wife, but he does recall his rejoinder. Seated beside a wall-mounted picture of cigars — stogie labels festooning its frame — the artist adjusted his glasses and quaffed his local IPA.
“I told them, ‘What do you think I’m doing? I’m paying my mortgage.’”
Now, the point of Leaper’s re-telling isn’t yet another sob story about how the tech-driven entertainment economy smote one more artist who was only beginning to master the craft of making great music. Nuh-uh.
The payoff is this other Portland rocker, a cat whose group is way more famous than The Minders. When that guy’s finances fell into similarly sad shape, Leaper let him know that the restaurant was hiring.
“He didn’t want to do it,” Leaper told me, “because he’d been in a band and he didn’t want people to see him. My attitude was that being seen there didn’t matter — ‘You did this work, it was terrific. What does it matter?’”
Brooklyn artist Marilyn Carino does not endorse being too cool to get one’s hands dirty, but she can identify with the perspective.
“‘Peon.’ ‘Working stiff.’ ‘I’m better than everyone else.’ I see now that I did that,” says the female energy in Mudville, progressive duo acclaimed in both The New Yorker and The New York Times. “And I was miserable.”
Five or six years ago, Carino was caught up in the pall that spread across New York music. The depression that had engulfed creators of cultural content had shot up her already-competitive scene with a new bag of nastiness. Clubs that weren’t closing were phasing out that whole paying-for-live-performance thing. And don’t get her started on the cost of living.
More than ever, artists were doing whatever felt clever to avoid falling the fuck off.
“One person who’s name I definitely will not mention — and you would definitely know his name if I said it — he lives in a hovel. He deals drugs and plays music. That’s it.
“I saw that rubbing off on me,” said Carino, who neither hustles dope nor dwells in filth. “I was living like someone I wasn’t. Like I was the sum total of what I had. I wasn’t enjoying music anymore, and no one I knew was enjoying music anymore.”
She told herself: If I can’t figure out how to do this and enjoy it, then I’m not going to do it anymore. That’s where Carino hooked up with the Atlanta-based R&B artist Akon’s camp, and happened upon joy in what once was Mudville.
After he ditched the dish-washing gig, Martyn Leaper returned to college, working toward a bachelor’s degree in history. Then the coffee magic kicked in.
A McMenimans manager taught her middle-aged charge about varietals and heat transfer and cultivars. Leaper’s grandfather had been an accountant on a Kenyan coffee plantation, which he had visited as a child. The stuff was in his blood.
And if you can keep a touring band together, how hard can it be to run a department? Then, seemingly out of nowhere, lyrics began arriving while he zoned out in the least engaging of his Portland State classes. The Minders were dormant, but his now-deceased bandmate Joel, passed Leaper a handful of DJ gigs that kept him close to the scene.
Next thing Leaper knew, he was making demos after work in his basement. Soon after, Bank of America used four seconds of The Minders song “Pauline,” in a commercial and — voila! — he had enough money to go see the producer Larry Crane.
A job is a terrible thing to waste.
“You go through a divorce, and it’s kind of like being sent to a meat grinder. Emotionally, financially — the whole lot. I really didn’t see a path. Once I got my sea legs with the [coffee] roasting, I began to feel more creative. I got into a rhythm again. The rhythm was in the routine. I need a routine to write — I didn’t have that. But this job gave me that.”
In a town renowned for its java culture, Leaper oversees a signature Portland company’s coffee business. Dude knows his beans. He bags the beans. He’s the bonafide boss of the beans. And if that sounds to the average Spotify user a far cry from the glory of opening for Neutral Milk Hotel — which The Minders did over two nights in 2014 — consider the objectively breathtaking guitarist Aram Bajakian, who regularly tours with luminaries like John Zorn, Diana Krall and James Carter.
Until last year, Bajakian was simultaneously selling real estate back East. One day in 2012 he was walking toward the office of an artist he was joining on tour. That office happened to be in the same neck of Manhattan as the realty office.
That’s when the side hustle boss appeared on the sidewalk in front of Bajakian.
“I was in my suit and tie and had my guitar slung over my shoulder,” the 37-year-old recalled.
“He was like, ‘So you’re coming in to work today?’
“I said, ‘No. I’m going to see Lou Reed.’
“And he’s like, ‘Oh. Who’s that?’”
Aram Bajakian, who now teaches at Sarah McLachlan School of Music in Vancouver, released two albums in 2014. New York Music Daily called his solo album there were flowers also in hell (Sansar Records) “[o]ne of the best instrumental rock records of recent years.” Dalava, a collection of Moravian folk songs, was lauded by acousticmusic.com as “ground-breaking” and “a masterpiece.”
The former sold between 200 and 300 copies, the latter just 50. Aficionados dug what Bajakian was putting down, but only a handful paid for it.
“I don’t want to not sell my stuff. If someone won’t pay $10–$15 for it, they don’t deserve my album,” he says. “If it’s this hard for me, what’s it like for someone who doesn’t have that kind of resume? What does that mean for music?” Bajakian holds a master’s degree in education from Columbia University, and he has discussed this topic with students.
“I’ve had guys tell me they’re pirating stuff, and I tell them that they’re fucking over their own future. They’re not investing into the system that in turn would be investing in them. If [labels] are gonna keep investing in interesting artists, they aren’t going to have the capital.”
The students have reacted to Bajakian’s words of warning with surprisingly positive attitudes. They may be kids, but they still harbor fantasies of making money from the music they produce.
A recurring theme among musical survivors of the terror unleashed by our tech sector overlords is a willingness to make good on conditions not previously forced upon brand-name players. Leaper finds himself working out arrangements as he folds coffee bags. Bajakian seems to have embraced the shoulder-to-shoulder real-estate interactions with folks he would never meet otherwise.
“Every day, you deal with four or five different people, all in the same day. One day, it’s a mom buying a home, the next it’s an investment banker,” says the guitarist, who sold property for eight years. And that helps you on tour. “You learn how to work with different people. You pick up on this stuff quickly — you know when to shut up. Those were skills I didn’t have before doing real estate. And, also, I did not get nervous when I went to audition for Lou Reed.”
He toured with the legend, who passed away in 2013, for two years. Then, quicker than you can say “Sweet Jane,” Bajakian was back inside empty dwellings, pitching their closet space and proximity to good schools.
“When you play with someone like Lou, you get the sense that you’ve accomplished something. But then you’ve got to hustle for the next big thing.”
Nimo Gandhi knows from hustling. Aside from the HTC commercial he shot with Robert Downey, Jr. in 2014, the piece of art you might best recognize him from is the fifth episode of Louie’s first season. That’s the surreal joint in which a bunch of taxis competed to pick up the show’s star. A black driver and an Indian driver — Gandhi is, surprise, the latter — rush their vehicles up to Louie CK, who’s hiding behind shades on a Manhattan street. When Gandhi gets the upper hand and lands the fare, the black guy produces a tire iron from his taxi. Gandhi gets his. They bash in each other’s windows. Hilarity ensues. Allegedly.
It’s a living. But he would rather you recognize him from his Brooklyn-based band, Gandhi. Less known for his musical accomplishments than the other artists discussed here, Gandhi, 37, is as serious about his artistic pursuits as anyone. The guitarist’s musical aspirations started with writing poetry in the 90s, roughly when he began working as a sales contractor. The relatively harsh realities of a work life outside rock manage to feed into Gandhi’s sphere of professional influence.
“Sales and acting are very similar in one area: You face rejection a lot. Sales cold-calling and attempting to get a potential client to relate to what you’re selling within 30 seconds of speaking with them on the phone is one of the most challenging tasks I’ve ever taken on,” Gandhi told me. With casting opportunities, “they may have seen your resume and may have searched you on the Internet — seen your reel, your IMDB page, etc. Even then, you have essentially five minutes to make an impression — to personally connect with them and then audition for a part. You are 95 percent of the time in the auditioning process, rejected and left in the dark as to why.
“There are things I do in my character work that allow me to become a more agile songwriter. The script and character work make me better at woodshedding and crafting songs.”
Martyn Leaper scrolls through his phone, reading scraps of lyrics that came to him while folding coffee bags. His screen in the darkness gives him a capitalist glow.
“‘Rock & roll is a confidence game,’” he reads, and we burst into laughter at the line’s duality. “When did I write that?”
The future is unwritten, as a (compensated) artist once famously opined. Marilyn Carino found her confidence not in Brooklyn, but in Atlanta, where Akon had signed a handful of raw talent and needed someone to prep them for performance contracts. The kids had to be able to perform live.
“I asked them to pay top dollar, and they didn’t blink,” recalled Carino. It was during the heart of the recession, and she was in the thick of creating a solo project called Little Genius. Yet, relatively straight work was also compelling. “Everyone I taught got better, and I was enjoying this.”
While she sank her teeth into the Akon job, Carino found herself teaching voiceover as well. That’s when one of the major labels — still high off the Mudville buzz — came sniffing around with a six-figure opportunity. As if it were the 90s again, she began to believe in the merits of a record deal.
When the corporate scheme fizzled, Carino fully committed to the jobby-job life, and with her earnings financed both Little Genius’ completion and that of the remarkable Leaves Sadness Science, which landed earlier this spring. When one of her songs got licensed for an ad, she was able to pay a guy to come in and sweeten her album tracks the same as Madonna or any other corporate product. “He made it sound the way I envisioned it sounding,” she says.
Easy-peasy, Carino copped social media and college marketing support. Then she landed a booking agent.
“No angst, no agro. None of that this time,” says Carino, a dedicated Buddhist. “It’s not just about trying to get over. It’s about being great. My ambition is bigger than it ever was, more focused. Not starry-eyed. It’s more realistic.”
If you look at contemporary musicians with the cool, clear vision of someone who’s hip that every Pandora play depletes the future health of musical diversity, you can come to the conclusion that the rock star as it’s generally understood is like starlight, not actually here anymore — a kind of sonic residue. Looking at iconic photographs of Mick and Keith — all mulleted and extravagantly druggy — it’s a struggle to not to be reminded of The Roaring Twenties. And we all know what jumped off after that shit.
If you play or sing for a living today, survive and create is the best-case scenario. This is hardly new; it just undermines a false paradigm derived from the salad days of artifice. Like the average rapper five years out from his first big hit, artists have always been poor.
“We’ve got to be ‘out’ about doing this,” Carino says of performing the work she once scorned. “I’m very proud of it — I’m living a life.”
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Cover photo of Martyn Leaper by Holly Andres
Follow Donnell Alexander on Twitter @donnyshell
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